Anton Henning – 9 hypertroph-kontemplative Ölmalereien und eine sportliche Skulptur
1st of May – 21st of June 2014
We are pleased to celebrate 20 years of cooperation with Anton Henning by presenting the solo show "9 Hypertrophic-Contemplative Oil Paintings and one Sporty Sculpture", which will open on April 30, 2014. In this exhibition, the focus is on Anton Henning’s rather unconventional new portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, where he alludes to modernist and old master paintings, paraphrasing them in a subversively ironic way, sometimes even caricaturing them. Through his carefully calculated system of autopoiesis as well as through his possibilities of self-referentiality and a simultaneous opening up of his Oeuvre, he undermines the usual methods of contextual image creation in contemporary painting. What is so striking here is that although his conceptual approach is highly important to Anton Henning, he never seems to lose sight of the painterly quality of his works.
Over the more than 20 years that the gallery has been working with this artist, Anton Henning never lost his ability to go in unpredicted directions, and thus every new exhibition has an element of surprise.
The art critic Thomas Wagner writes: "Anton Henning is the prophet of mixing, of blending, of taking up again and a concrete circulation of works and ideas, in any case more akin to hedonism than to artistic purity laws of any kind."
"Anton Henning’s art approaches and is constantly devoting itself to forms and posititons in art history, chiefly from Modernism. Not to simpy quote them but to look playfully for those which are still active and for the painterly potential that may be latent in them. The slant he adopots is neither historically exact nor objective but fundamentally probing, arbitrary and oblique. The meaningful purpose of the raids he goes on through the magazines of an imaginary Modernist museum is, on the one hand, to look through what they contain to find out where possibilities are provided and to resolve blockages. On the other, he persists in once again and iteratively painting the old lines of conflict, juxtaposing abstract and figurative, representational and non-representational."
Quotation: Thomas Wagner: Fünf Schleifen für Anton Henning oder Die Kunst, im Museum der Moderne frei und lebendig zu bleiben. Katalogtext anlässlich der Ausstellung „Antonym. Malerei. Zeichnungen. Skulptur. Video 1990 – 2009“ im Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen am Rhein und der Kunsthalle Mannheim, 2009.
Works by Anton Henning are in international and national renowned public and private collections.
From July 19 to November 9, 2014 Anton Henning’s works will be shown as part of "Bad Thoughts – Collection Martijn and Jeanette Sanders" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. A whole room of this show will be devoted to Henning.
Just in time for the exhibition, MONOPOL – Magazin für Kunst und Leben has published an edition by Anton Henning: "Ceci n’est pas une femme. No. 2 der aktuellen Grafikken für die Gästetoilette" (70 x 50 cm, signed and numbered, edition of 20 + 2 AP). For more information, see www.monopol-magazin.de